File Compression
SimsDiva:
A friend of mine is having problems with file compression, so I thought I'd tell you all the situation and see if someone can help me out with it. Lord knows that people in the Sims community have become masters at crunching down big files! ;)
So here's the situation: She's got a file that approximately 19 MB, and would like to compress it as much as possible so she can either email it to some friends, or upload it to a yahoo group we're all on. Yahoo has a 5mb limit (as I'm sure most of you know).
I've downloaded many things for my game where the zip knocked down to a 1/3 of it's original size... so I know there's some way to super compress them. Problem is, I can't figure out how to do it. The most I've ever knocked one down is maybe a meg, if I was lucky.
Can someone tell me (in very easy terms) how to do some serious compressing on file size? I was planning to RTFM (again) for both winzip/rar after I got some sleep, but I figured it might be a good idea to ask those who have mastered the process as well.
I'd appreciate any pointers... this thing is driving me and my friend up the damn wall!
eevilcat:
It depends on what kind of file your trying to compress. 19Mb is fairly large so it's probably a picture, a document containing picture(s) or a video clip. While your file compression software will reduce the size a bit it's certainly not going to knock it below 5Mb. What she needs to do is compress/change the format of the original file using appropriate software e.g. if it's a picture check the resolution (pixel size) and the format e.g. if it's in bitmap (.BMP) format then convert it to JPG and lower the quality. I don't know that much about video formats other than changing resolution and/or the compression codec can reduce the size e.g. DivX usually results in smaller files.
Gwill:
Some types of files simply compress better than others. Some types of files are already compressed by the very nature of their file format.
RAR compresses tighter than ZIP, and there are other formats that compress even more, but then people start complaining along the lines of "ONG I need Zip, my computer don't do RAR!"
J. M. Pescado:
There is also the option of breaking it up into 3-4 zips as a multi-part file.
jrd:
There's some good advice here.
Always start with the uncompressed source data, and make sure it is as small as possible. For images, this means turning it into JPG for lossy compression or PNG otherwise, compressing it as much as possible (PNG should always be compressed with the highest factor, and for JPG you often can go down to 70% without noticable quality loss), and make sure no extraneous data is included (you seldom-if-ever need thumbnails etc.).
Then compress with the highest compression factor. When I seriously need to crunch data I use 7Zip, solid archive, maximum compression. Experiment a bit with the values: e.g. Deflate64 for ZIP /may/ result in a smaller file, and /some/ 7Z archives can benefit from PPMd.
And if all else fails, span it across multiple archives.
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